Time & Perspective Quote by Kenneth Scott Latourette

A historian’s compliment that doubles as a quiet power move: Latourette frames Christianity not first as theology, but as a world-historical fact. By opening with “usually called a religion,” he subtly loosens the category, hinting that Christianity functions as more than private belief. It is an infrastructure: institutions, calendars, moral vocabularies, literacy campaigns, welfare systems, and political legitimacy. The sentence reads like neutral description, yet it smuggles in a thesis about scale as significance.

The key is his metric choice. He doesn’t argue Christianity is true or ethically superior; he argues it is unusually successful at embedding itself. “Geographic spread” and “deeply rooted” aren’t the same claim. Spread can be conquest, trade, or migration. “Deeply rooted” suggests durable adoption: local clergy, vernacular scripture, hybrid rituals, family life, schooling. Latourette is signaling that Christianity’s historical peculiarity lies in its capacity to travel and then naturalize itself.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of European imperial expansion and its unraveling, Latourette’s language reflects mid-20th-century “world Christianity” scholarship: the attempt to describe a global religion without reducing it to European history. Still, the subtext can’t fully escape empire. “Among more peoples” sounds inclusive, but it also echoes a census-taking, civilization-measuring gaze that colonial modernity perfected.

The rhetorical restraint is the point. By keeping the tone statistical, he invites readers to treat Christianity’s dominance as an observable baseline of human history, not a partisan claim. That’s precisely how cultural power likes to speak: as if it’s merely reporting the weather.